Way back in 1981, I submitted a paper for presentation at an upcoming conference. I was relatively fresh out of graduate school with a big Master’s degree in Organizational Psychology, and I had spent the better part of three years trying to implement the annual performance appraisal program recently demanded by the newly-created Office of Personnel Management. My academic training plus my real-life experience was telling me that annual performance appraisal was a poor management tool and a waste of time for both managers and employees. In addition, I could tell that even with good employees, performance appraisal could easily demotivate. Therefore, I proposed that OPM abolish annual appraisal in a wonderful little paper entitled, “Just Say No to Annual Performance Appraisal” (a tip of the hat to Nancy Reagan who had just come up with that catchy phrase, “Just Say No to Drugs”; I knew that annual appraisals were a bigger problem than drugs in the federal workplace). And last year, I’m reading the paper and I see that the latest trend in business is to do away with annual performance appraisals because they don’t work, are time-consuming, and often de-motivate (Washington Post, July 22, 2015, p. A-15). Hey, I can’t help it if I’ve often been ahead of my time, a frigging genius in my own mind. So would you like to see into the future, know what is the right thing to do decades before your peers figure it out? Well then, Poopsie, you should keep reading this here newsletter and attending our seminars as the secrets of the employment law universe are revealed to you. Also, somebody please tell OPM that Wiley was right in 1981, and that the annual performance appraisal system it invented STILL should be abolished. It’s never too late to get on board the FELTG wisdom-train.
